


Afternoon Tea

by elizajane



Series: Having Considered the Eyes of the World [1]
Category: Upstairs Downstairs (2011)
Genre: F/F, an affair to remember, inclement weather, neglect of tea, unexpected outcomes, widows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-30
Updated: 2011-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-18 19:38:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recently widowed Lady Maud Holland returns to London from thirty-two years abroad to find that the woman she left England to forget still has the power to distract her from the scintillating task of writing her memoirs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afternoon Tea

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to CrowGirl and Minerva for the beta love, and for one or two essential pointers. Not to mention their insistence that I provide plenty of orgasms in every fic.

She has returned to London after more than thirty years abroad, and the city no longer feels like home.

Which is not to say that Rawalpindi felt entirely like “home” either, although she had made it so through force of will. Her husband had been assigned there, when Hallum had been only six years old, and so they had gone.

It had not been a discussion, and at the time she had been grateful the decision was out of her hands.

Nor had there been a discussion about sending Hallum back to England, to school. All of the Anglo-Indians were doing the same. So she had journeyed south to Bombay, along with the ayah, and embarked upon the long sea voyage back to England. And she had left him, despite his tears, knowing it was _this_ mother he would, in all likelihood, remember: the one who abandoned him.

It was simply what had to be done.

But then Lord Holland, her husband of forty-three years, had died. Suddenly. A brain fever. It was all over in a fortnight, almost before she had time to realize he was gravely ill.

And she was alone, without purpose.

Oh, at first she’d had the role of grieving widow to attend to, all black crepe and black-edged stationary, the endless callers and the flowers – oh merciful heaven the flowers. It had gotten to the point where she felt she would scream if she saw another cut flower arrangement, and had retreated out behind the villa to her rose garden where she yanked fiercely at the colonizing weeds until the urge to take the shears and hack every bouquet in the house to bits had passed.

She missed him dreadfully, with the familiar gnawing pain of grief. They had not started out close, over the years they had become friends. With a shared history, a life they had made in a foreign land that counted for something. More shocking than that, however, was the realization that through this particular death she had lost her place in the world. Through Roland, she had been someone. A someone other people understood. She was Lady Holland, a _memsahib_ , and she had played her part with a fierce pride.

Then suddenly, it was no more.

The Raj had no place for Anglo-Indian widows, at least those who had no relations to beg hospitality from.

Not that she would have been the begging kind.

So she had packed up her life in a dozen steamer trunks and made the journey for the second time in her life: Rawalpindi to Bombay, Bombay to Cairo, Cairo to London.

Where she had imposed herself ( _not_ the begging kind) upon her son (she had been right: it was the tears he remembered) and his slightly frantic wife.

She had no place in London, either, she acknowledged to herself. But at least in London, she could take refuge in the trappings of colonial life: wrapping her silks and shawls around her, allowing Solomon free reign among the breakfast dishes, saying the most inappropriate things to the most inappropriate people. It was a fragile, spikey, sort of refuge, but for the moment it was what she had.

* * *

Perhaps, she muses, it is this strange chain of events – the sudden loss of one life, the beginning of another – that has made her … _open_ to unfamiliar feelings. Perhaps it is this self-imposed project of organizing her papers and writing her memoirs ( _Always a Stranger: Thirty-two Years in Rawalpindi_ ) that has stirred up certain memories that by necessity have been locked away since the day she and Roland, Hallum between them, had stood at the rail of the _H.M.S. York_ as it pulled away from the dock.

The rain runs steadily down the panes of glass on her sitting room window. She can hear the _tick tock tick_ of the clock on the mantle as time moves inexorably forward. Solomon, who had spent much of the morning attempting to steal the nibs of her ink pen and dip his fingers in the inkwell, eat the manuscript pages and pull the fringe off her Kashmir shawl, is now curled up asleep on the settle.

She had purposefully avoided Eaton Place on her last return, staying with her mother’s family in Hampstead before and after delivering Hallum to school. It had been too raw, then, to contemplate the possibility of accidentally meeting Rose in the hallway or (she refused to allow herself to contemplate it) guest bedroom or bath.

This time, she had known Rose to have retired from her position. She’d moved on with her life, just as Maud had (Maud briskly and firmly told herself). She had started an employment agency, was no longer in service. She had done well for herself.

They had made the right decision.

(At least, this is what Maud has been telling herself for the past three decades).

Then Agnes (half-hysterical, self-absorbed Agnes!) had disrupted this delicate internal _detante_ Maud had with her own conscience by returning home that day with Rose in her wake.

And then Maud had found herself persuading Rose to stay.

* * *

She has returned to London after over thirty years and somehow (she thinks, exasperated) she has come full circle even after all this time. She has returned to the point where the she waits every day for the arrival of afternoon tea.

It had been a ritual between them, in the old days, and one that Rose had resumed without comment upon her first afternoon back at Eaton Place. Without comment and … without certain other things that, in times past, had been understood between them.

Maud is still unsure what emotions this eventuality stirred up within her. The first day, when Rose had come through the door with the tea tray in hand, Maud had nearly dropped Solomon on the floor in surprise, her heart racing in such a manner that she imagined for a moment or two she might faint.

She had _not_ fainted, she recalls now with pride. Quite simply because _memsahibs_ such as herself do not faint at so slight a provocation.

She had been … frightened, she admits to herself. Frightened in a way she had not been frightened in all the years since leaving England.

And yet, she recalls now (as she has recalled many times over the passed two months), it had not been fear that stirred in her breast when Rose had set down the tea tray and seated herself with complete propriety to pour the tea.

That day they had spoken of the servants belowstairs, of the weather, of Maud’s advancing manuscript, of Agnes’ newly-discovered pregnancy and the worrying preoccupation with prams.

Then after the last biscuit had been eaten, and the dregs of their tea became cold, Rose had made her excuses and taken the tray away again.

The room had felt suddenly dim, and cold. Maud had been forced to emerge and inflict herself irascibly upon her daughter-in-law.

* * *

Since then it has become a daily, or near daily, ritual. At three o’clock (or near enough as makes no difference), Maud will arrange to be cloistered in her parlor and Rose will appear with the tea tray in hand. They will sit – sometimes speaking, sometimes in companionable silence – for perhaps an hour before Rose speaks of having to go meet with Cook or arrange for a delivery.

At which point The Moment (as Maud has come to think of it) will suddenly, irrevocably, passed. And with Rose’s departure, Maud finds herself disconsolate for a short period of time – oh for some flower beds to viciously weed! – before she finds her bearings again.

Her daughter-in-law has learned (though she is at a loss for a reason) that the period of time between four and six in the evening is a good time to be _absent_ from Eaton Place, or to be “resting” in her own room.

* * *

Today, Rose appears at six past three, tea tray balanced deftly before her as she comes through the door.

“Good afternoon Lady Holland,” she says, as always.

“Good afternoon Rose.” Maud lays her pen down and turns toward the housekeeper who has bent over the tea table to position her tray. She bends her head, Maud thinks, in exactly the same graceful dip that first caught Maud’s attention all those years before. If anything, time has given her a greater sense of poise; the nervous energy of her youth has mellowed into a sense of purpose.

“You should do something with your hair, Rose.” The words are out of her mouth before she can weigh the dangers of opening this particular thread of conversation.

Rose raises a hand to her head self-consciously.

“Women of our age,” Maud says in a decisive tone, “cannot afford to be lax in matters of appearance.”

“Anyway,” she continues, before Rose can object, “your hair has softened in the most beguiling fashion, Rose. You must deliberately neglect it to make it lie so. Come here; I shall remedy matters.” She stands up and moves toward the small vanity in the corner of the room, where a hairbrush and combs are laid out with military precision.

Rose avoids her eyes, but complies. She sits down on the low stool before the mirror and only then looks up, meeting Maud’s eyes in the glass.

Something passes between them, such that Maud’s hand shakes when she goes to pick up the tortoiseshell comb. If she handles this meeting with care, the hours from four to six this afternoon may be much more bearable than the ones that have come before.

She can no longer remember, despite all those hours spent on her memoirs, quite why a life spent without this woman had ever seemed … if not desirable, then necessary.

With her right hand, she pulls out the hairpins that hold Rose’s hair away from her face. Maud now remembers how soft Rose’s hair has always been, gathering the fragrance of her skin throughout the day so that when Maud would bury her face in the bun at the base of Maud’s neck, she could smell the scent of sweat and wood polish, the scouring powder used to clean the silver, the lavender folded between the linens before they were put in the cupboard.

She runs her fingers through the fine, graying locks, feeling the shape of Roses scalp.

Rose hasn’t taken her eyes off Maud in the mirror, though her back is straight and her hands are folded in her lap.

“You’ve cut it so short, Rose,” Maud mourns, pulling the hair away from the base of Rose’s neck with her right hand and beginning to comb through silky hair with her left. She exposes the neat little shell of Rose’s ear. Remembers how she used to enjoy running her tongue around the folds of its cartilage, nipping and sucking until Rose begged her to stop, laughing breathlessly, her eyes bright with pleasure.

Roland had not let her touch lips to his ear, though sometimes she had waited until he was sleep asleep and ghosted her lips along the lobe, the upper curl, remembering (she had not allowed herself to acknowledge it was remembering, but now as she stood with her hands buried in Rose’s hair, and the ear came into view, she told herself quite sternly that it _had_ been, at least in part, remembering all along).

The ear before her now was familiar and, quite simply, needed to be licked.

So Maud bent forward and licked it.

Rose let out a small, startled intake of breath (too controlled to be a proper gasp), half pulling away, half turning her head and neck so that Maud’s mouth had better access not only to the exposed ear, but also the soft fragrant skin behind her ear. Even softer than Maud’s mouth remembers it to be, like the finest silk she ever fingered in the bazaars in India.

Maud finds, to her own surprise, that the hand not holding the tortoiseshell comb has slide down to cup Rose’s breast beneath the starched black cloth of her workday attire.

She can feel Rose’s pulse beating strong against her fingers – or perhaps that is in fact her own pulse, which has suddenly risen to a crescendo in her ears.

She realizes her whole body has begun to shake and reaches out to put down the comb, pressing her forehead against Rose’s temple to steady herself.

She must take a moment to concentrate on breathing.

“Maud?” Roses hands come up from her lap to clasp Maud’s wrists, the hands strong against the protruding bones of her wrists. “Maud.” The housekeeper stands and turns around to sweep the shaking Maud up in sure arms.

They stand still for long moments. The ringing in Maud’s ears gradually dims. She becomes aware of the _tick tock tick_ of the clock once more. Imagines their tea growing cold by the window. The rain continues to beat against the glass.

These mundane details ground her once more in the here, the now.

Although, hope against hope, it is a now that includes Rose’s arms holding her in a way she never expected to be held ever again.

* * *

Rose draws back to look into Maud’s face, lifting a hand to trace the fine lines around her eyes and mouth, to caress the soft loose flesh beneath her chin.

“I – I didn’t think you wanted this – to be like this – with me,” She whispers, “any more. I thought – tea. We could be – companions. You seemed to want – companionship.”

“I am an old woman, Rose,” Maud laughs. “and while ‘companionship’ is certainly what is expected to satisfy a woman my age, I find it is hardly sufficient to pass the time. I find myself with so many empty hours to fill, and no purpose with which to fill them.”

Rose draws her hand down, to clasp Maud’s in her own. She looks down, rubbing a thumb over Maud’s knuckles. Appearing to examine the veins in the back of her hand with great care.

“So I am to be merely an entertainment? A way of passing the time?” there is more than a trace of bitterness in Rose’s voice.

Maud wonders, not for the first time, if Rose had come to the pier that day to watch the York depart.

“You know you were never that.” She says softly to Rose’s bowed head. “Never.”

Rose looks back up into her face. Maud wonders, under the uncomfortably piercing gaze, what she will see there. What she has already seen there: the traces of three pregnancies, the loss of two infants (one to stillbirth, the other to cholera); forty-one years of marriage – not all of them wholly forgettable; the years upon years of life in an utterly foreign land that Rose will never know.

They are different people now than they once were.

Yet if this is so, why does Maud feel as if she has suddenly woken from a long and restless sleep to find herself where she had been when, so long ago, she’d unwisely drifted off: breathing the same air as Rose Buck, under the same roof?

Whatever Rose sees in Maud’s face satisfies her because with a soft huff of exhaled breath the tension that had been creeping into her shoulders vanishes and she leans across their intertwined fingers to press dry lips against Maud’s mouth.

* * *

It has been years since Maud has been party to a kiss such as this. A kiss that starts out tentative, almost chaste, the press of dry lips against dry lips. Then one of them (herself? Rose? she will never be certain) parts those lips to dart out a moist tongue.

Movement.

Arms, shifting to embrace bodies.

Bodies, adjusting to accommodate arms.

Feet, shuffling for balance.

Lips, suddenly wet and urgent.

Tongues, questing, seeking, knowing.

Rose has lost a tooth, no, two, since Maud has last kissed her in such a fashion. She tastes of baking soda toothpaste and an earlier cup of tea, as well as the onions and beef broth that comprised the noon meal.

Rose’s hands push impatiently at Maud’s silk jacket, hot through the cloth, suddenly needy. Maud wonders, in the part of her brain not focused on the beautifully intricate task of kissing Rose thoroughly, whether for her, too, this is a sudden monsoon of desire after long drought. Has Rose had other lovers since Maud’s departure? Maud isn’t sure she wishes to know the answer: if yes the jealousy will be unbearable, if no the pain of Rose’s solitude will be unbearable to carry.

Not that anything, she thinks in a sudden blaze of self-satisfied certainly, could possibly have adequately replaced what they had – have? – together. Everything else would, like her experience with Roland, be pale imitation.

“Oh, my dear,” she murmurs, aching with need. She is shaking again, this infernal trembling. Her body is unaccustomed to the rush of desire. She runs her hands up and down Rose’s body, feeling the shape of her beneath layers of cloth.

Rose captures her mouth for another kiss, hands fumbling with the hem of Maud’s blouse, which hangs hip-length atop her skirt. Finally finding the edge of the cloth, Rose slips her hands up beneath the loose fabric. She finds the flesh of Maud’s breasts, protected beneath her camisole, laying almost flat against her chest. Fingers explore the contours of a familiar yet time-etched body. Maud closes her eyes against the scrutiny, terrified (as a schoolgirl is fearful of being rejected by her clique of girls) that Rose will find this body of hers distasteful in its particulars … that memory won’t be enough to sustain them.

Yet her breasts yearn toward the caress, even though the cotton fabric rising, hardening. Her nipples haven’t felt this way since – she pauses –

\--it reminds her of suckling Hallum and Rahda as babies. The gentle pulling motion (Rose has weighed her breasts in the palms of her hands and apparently not found them wanting), the sharp stabs of not unpleasant pain. Roland had been clumsy with her breasts, half indifferent, half obsessed. She had felt caromed between fending him off and trying to find creative ways of reminding him that between her legs wasn’t the only location for making love (particularly the area between her legs he was so interested in). Though they had both started the marriage in good faith, it had been this more than anything, that had--

– a sound rises from her throat she has forgotten she knew how to make. Rose captures her lips with her own mouth and nips Maud’s lower lip with her teeth, while twisting her nipples hard in both hands.

“You listen to me, Maud.” Rose emphasizes her words with pressure between her thumb and forefinger such that Maud feels incapable of doing anything _but_ listen to her. “Thirty-two years I’ve had to live with the fact that you _left me_. Now I know why you did, and I know why we made the choices we made. But I only have so much life left to live. And if you want me, you know you can have me.”

She pauses, almost panting with concentration, as she weighs her words.

“You always knew you could have me. All you ever had to do was ask. But I don’t want you to ask unless you’re certain. Unless you’re ready. Unless you’re done with all the life you had to live between now and then and you’re ready to come back to me for good. You hear?”

Maud whimpers, and grips Rose’s wrists in her hands. Rose lets go of the nipples, now painfully erect, and presses the heels of her hands against the soft breast tissue, kneading sensation back into abused nerve endings.

“I hear you, Rose.” Maud tries to say, though it comes out in a strangled whisper. She clears her throat and tried again, opening her eyes and catching Rose’s intense gaze with her own. “And I’m ready.”

* * *

Rose is quiet for a long moment, thinking. _You’ve spent so many years trying to forget. Closing your ears, your eyes, your sense of touch, the traces of Maud left in this place. So many years, until you realized it couldn’t be done and you left._ She feels her mouth twist in a self-deprecating smile. She had finally found the courage to leave – and all it took was Agnes showing up on her doorstep. All it took was the _possibility_ of seeing Maud again, to bring her running back.

She had tried to be the housekeeper she thought Maud wanted. Had tried to find that delicate balance between professional distance and warm acquaintanceship that a favored servant might be expected to have with a formidable member of the family such as Lady Holland, returned from the colonies. A close working relationship. Something more than a servant, never quite fully a friend.

This is, after all, what they had agreed to, all those years ago. This was what they had so miserably failed to achieve before Maud had abandoned the whole wretched business (before Maud had abandoned her) by retreating first into marriage and motherhood and then, when even those ties failed to keep them apart, run away to India. Half a world away.

 _I tried, damn you._ She feels tears pricking her eyes and blinks rapidly to keep them at bay. _I tried to do what you wanted. What I thought you wanted. And then you had to start speaking of hair._

_And then you had to_ touch _me._

It had been like fire, Maud’s hands on her hair, on her skin. Maud’s dry lips on the skin of her neck.

The lips had been underhanded. Maud had always known what to do with her mouth to persuade Rose to whatever she damn well wanted her to do.

 _Was_ she ready, this time around? Ready to face the truth of what was between them as a younger Maud had not?

The truth was, in this moment Rose didn’t care. Oh, she had asked. She had demanded: Are you ready? But in that moment, she knew she would do whatever Maud asked of her. Simply because Maud has asked it.

* * *

Maud’s bedroom is through the narrow door to the left of the settle. They make their way blindly to it, mouths tasting each others’ lips, cheekbones, eyelids, throats. Hands plucking, pulling, grasping.

Rose pushes her fingers into the knot of hair at the base of Maud’s scalp, scattering pins on the wooden floor. She pulls Maud down to her, tracing lips upon lips, tongue flicking out experimentally – almost playfully – to taste the contours of her lover’s mouth.

Maud has managed to work half a dozen buttons down the front of Rose’s dress free, presses a knee deftly between Rose’s legs to pin her to the door frame while she undoes half a dozen more.

They are both panting. Maud can feel the fluttering of Rose’s pulse as her fingers fumble to remove the layers of clothing. Rose has managed to pull Maud’s blouse open, is lowering her mouth to Maud’s breast, the mauve nipple visible beneath her thin underclothes.

The curve of Rose’s neck, the feel of her breath through the cloth: Maud recalls, with breathtaking suddenness, the morning thirty-three years before, when Rose’s mouth had last touched her just so. Her breasts had been full, then. Aching from the pressure of milk her stillborn daughter wouldn’t need. The doctor had bound her tight: excruciating pain. Rose had found her, weeping, and unwrapped her with gentle hands. Pressed lips and hands where Maud most needed them, and drawn the pain away. Replaced it with other, equally demanding, sensations.

It had been that day when Maud had realized that nothing she did, short of leaving this world entirely, could sever the bond that she and Rose had forged.

Twelve weeks later, she and Roland and Hallum had been on their way to India.

The bed is impossibly far away, across what seems a wasteland of floorboards. Somehow they manage to make their way to the edge of the mattress. The back of Rose’s knees are the first to make contact and she sinks backward across the blankets, pulling Maud down beside her. Supporting herself on her right elbow, Maud’s neck cradled against her right palm, she slides a hand up Maud’s leg to her thigh. The billowy silk trousers Maud has been wearing over bare skin allow for easy passage.

This used to require so much more dexterity.

Maud’s skin is on fire: a minor miracle (if she believed in miracles). She had thought the intensity of feeling had faded with age. One doesn’t think of one’s aged relatives in this fashion. And yet, now she was an aged relative – why _shouldn’t_ she behave in such a fashion if she wanted to?

And she damn well wants to.

“My darling, love, let me – you are entirely too clothed.” She manages to break away, panting, half sitting up among the pillows. Rose is flushed, the color of her namesake. She lays back on the bed, her hair fanning out around her head like an unkempt halo.

“I’ve – changed.” She whispers. “A bit.” Her eyes are on Maud’s ink-stained fingers, working their way down her breastbone. Maud unbuttons the shirtwaist and pushes it aside. Unbuttons the black skirt and pushes it down over Rose’s bony hips. Boots unlaced, stockings rolled down and discarded. Rose finally lays across the quilted bedspread in her drawers and chemise, a sensible linen.

Maud runs a hand from the base of Rose’s throat to the middle of her thigh, lingering across the swell of her breast, the dip of her belly, the warmth between her thighs. She can feel the scratch of fine, wiry hairs beneath the thin cloth as her hand passes.

Rose shivers.

“No more than I.” She points out. “We’ve both of us changed. It’s what bodies do, after all.” Maud slips off the edge of the bed, pulling Rose’s drawers after her so that her lover is splayed naked on the coverlet.

The hair between her legs has faded from copper to gold, and thinned so that Maud can see the pink folds of skin tucked beneath the golden curls.

It is Maud’s turn to shiver.

She slips out of the trousers of her _salwar kameez_ and the drawers beneath. Naked, except for the well-washed cotton of her own camisole, she crawls back onto the mattress to straddle Rose’s hips, settling herself across her lover’s warm groin.

Again, Rose shivers, says nothing, as Maud leans forward and rests her weight on her hands, one to either side of Rose’s head. Rose has closed her eyes, suddenly still and waiting. She has not pulled away or indicated that she wishes to call things to a halt … but her body language is … reluctant. Shy? Maud thinks to herself. A challenge.

She leans down and places her face against Rose’s neck, inhaling. The smell of warm skin and arousal fills the air between them.

“You smell the same,” she whispers. “After all these years. All you had to do was walk into the room and I knew it was you, even before I turned around.”

Beneath her Rose stirs, though her eyes remain closed. She lifts her hands, almost tentative, and pushes them up beneath the fabric of Maud’s camisole, once again cupping the pendant breasts in her palms. Pressing herself up as Maud lowers herself down for a kiss.

One breath. Two.

Then they have found the rhythm of lust once more, grappling with one another across the bedclothes, breathless and laughing, clumsily negotiating the awkward choreography of limbs as they re-learn the geometry of togetherness.

“I remember how you used to like this,” Rose whispers slyly, pulling her leg up between Maud’s thighs to press her knee with gentle firmness into the warm, wet folds protected there.

Maud groans at the pressure, so welcome against the aching pulse that pounds against her pubic bone. “God, yes. Oh, _please_ \--” She rocks back on her tailbone, Rose’s leg between her thighs, and pressed down, eyes closed, rocking against the solid flesh and bone that anchors her.

Hands grip hands, holding her in this world as her consciousness spirals before and behind her, recalling, reliving, opening up to the possibility that stretched out before them is a future of this – feelings she thought she would never again experience. Had schooled herself to forget. To live without expectation of.

“That’s right, mmm, yes,” Rose is humming to her in concentration, rocking her own hips up and forward in time to Maud’s movements, so their skin creates a pleasant, tight friction.

Maud can feel the growing heat against her right knee, which is pressed tight to the cloth of Rose’s drawers. Why had she stopped at Rose’s underclothes? She reaches down and pulls Rose off the bed, into her arms, fingers searching for the hem of her chemise.

“Off,” she says tightly. Rose lifts her arms obediently and Maud pulls the cloth over her head. Flings it to the floor. Rose repeats the process for Maud. They press together, kissing, hot mouths against hot skin – it is a damp midwinter day in London, but Maud feels they might as well be enveloped in the heat of an Indian summer. She can taste the sweat on Rose’s upper lip, feel the slippery moisture between her breasts.

Hands pinning Rose’s wrists to the pillows, Maud begins to work her way south from lips to throat to collarbone. Rose has stopped speaking in words, rolling sounds around in her chest that speak more plainly than any language Maud has had occasion to hear: _Touch me. Taste me. Know me. Love me. Again and again and again and again._

Maud’s mouth finds the velvety flesh of Rose’s breasts, the hardened nipples, wrinkled and tight with pleasure. She kisses her way around them, leaving trails of saliva, pulls them in between her lips creating suction that causes Rose to arch up off the bed, fingers grasping with need.

Maud observes with satisfaction that she hasn’t lost the knack she once had for sensual pleasures despite the years that have passed between _then_ (it always has been “then” in her mind; she never allowed herself to dwell on exactly how long past it had become) and _now_.

She untangles her fingers from Rose’s grasp and snakes her body down between naked legs, kissing and licking across the soft flesh of Rose’s belly and into the silver-gold fur that springs tangled from between her thighs.

“Maud--” for a breathless moment, Rose’s hands scrabble to pull Maud away from the objective, her body curling in on itself in shy self-protection, “Maud, I--”

“Please, Rose.” Maud stills but does not move. “You have no idea how many moments I have spent in the past thirty-three years longing to be right here, doing this very thing.”

Rose looks at her like she’s gone slightly mad. “Of course I do. Every day. Every hour. Every moment. Don’t be daft.” And she lets herself fall back onto the pillows, spreading her legs and pressing her hips open in invitation.

“My turn next.” She whispers. And gives herself over to Maud’s lips and teeth and tongue and hands.

* * *

Maud begins gently, kissing her way up the left side of Rose’s groin, where the inner thigh fits into the cradle of hipbone, across the mound of her pubic bone, down the other soft crevice of skin on the left.

Rose turns her face toward the pillow and moans, her hips twitching beneath Maud’s firm grasp.

Maud trails her tongue, wet with saliva, down through the curling hairs to the dusky pink folds. They are soft and warm and slightly damp beneath her mouth, though not as damp as they need to be for what Maud has in mind. She runs her tongue generously across her lips and begins to coat the delicate skin beneath her mouth with wetness, tasting the sweet tang of her lover’s arousal, breathing in the scent of sex with every inhalation.

She can taste the salt of Rose’s sweat, feel the pulse of desire beneath her tongue as blood begins to gather below the skin.

Rose is whimpering now, knuckles white with tension as she grips the blankets and strains against the control of Maud’s arms wrapped around her thighs and locking her hips into place. Her knees against Maud’s shoulder blades are trickling sweat as she clenches and unclenches the muscles of her thighs.

Once she feels confident that everything is coated slick from her mouth and from Rose’s own excitation, Maud narrows her focus to the sensitive nub nestled just below the peak of golden curls, the apex of the flushed lips spread open before her.

She runs her tongue up under the protective folds, eliciting a stifled cry of pleasure from the writhing woman beneath her, and then presses her lips firmly around the sensitive point, sucking the flesh up into her mouth and fluttering her tongue against the place where she knew from personal experience thousands of nerve endings were crying out for attention.

She remembers, now, how they used to spend hour upon hour like this in closeted solitude, lost in a world of their own senses, the rhythm of their bodies entwined and alive. They lost time, this way, floating on a tide of sensation that insisted that if only they remained in this space, this moment, for ever and always nothing would ever be able to touch them.

Nothing would ever be able to tear them apart.

“Maud! Please!” Rose is batting ineffectually at her head, pulling with shaking hands at her shoulders, her ears, “Please! Closer …”

Maud breaks the suction of her mouth against flesh and wriggles (deliberately pressing skin to over-sensitized flesh) upward to meet Rose in a deep, wet kiss in which the taste of their mouths now includes the taste of Rose’s sweet insides.

They break away, panting. Maud feels slightly light-headed, and wonders whether it is simply the unaccustomed excitement of the afternoon or whether her breath control isn’t want it used to be.

Well, there are alternative routes to the desired end. She fumbles at the drawer in her bedside table for the bottle of almond oil she keeps there for her own personal use. When she holds it up, triumphant, Rose looks at her, slightly scandalized. “Maud! You never!”

“What? You thought I’d have forgotten? Gone without when Roland was away? Gone without since he’s been gone?” She unscrews the bottle and pours a small pool of oil into her right hand.

“Now. Where were we.” Rubbing her fingers together to distribute the oil, she shifts back toward Rose and leans in for a kiss, slipping the oiled hand deftly between Rose’s open thighs.

Rose arches to her touch, letting out a small stifled moan of pure pleasure. Maud presses down with her knuckles, reaching in with one finger, then two, the tight opening less elastic than she remembers but clearly still sensitive as Rose thrusts her hips forward to aid in the efforts.

“Closer.” She grunts. “Deeper. God, Maud, _please_.”

She had only ever been truly profane in bed, Maud remembers with a smile, and pulls her fingers upward against the rough spot just inside Rose’s opening.

“ _Fuck_.”

“Such language. What _will_ the servants think,” Maud leans in to whisper against Roses ear.

“I said ‘Fuck me, Lady Holland,’” Rose turns and looks her straight in the eye. “Please.”

So Maud, who has never been able to resist a direct request from Rose when Rose is lying naked before her, does.

* * *

Rose comes quickly after that -- a few strokes more against the muscles deep inside, the pressure of Maud’s thumb at the pulse point where her lips had pressed minutes before, and Rose is shaking in her arms, her limbs rigid -- then shuddering without control.

A moment after that and Maud realizes that Rose is weeping, her breath coming is gasping sobs and tears running down her cheeks.

They cling together in the fragile aftermath of orgasm, Maud rubbing her hand -- slick with oil and saliva and sex -- in soothing circles between Rose’s shoulders, murmuring wordless assurances.

After that, they lie in silence and stillness. Rain is still beating against the window and the light in the bedroom is quickly fading to night, despite the fact that the clock in the sitting room has just chimed half four. Maud lies on her back with Rose’s head cradled against her breast, feeling the other woman’s slow breathing, both languid and alert.

Rose’s hand slides down from where it had come to rest, tucked between Maud’s right side and the curve of her right elbow, tracing the rise and fall of Maud’s wrinkled belly and sliding with intent between her legs.

Wordlessly, Maud rises up to meet the questing hand, her legs opening to give Rose room to angle her fingers down and inward. So familiar and yet so foreign, the presence of another fingers moving, rubbing, pressing, pulling, and -- oh!

It has only been her own for so many months now, and for so long before that hands so differently-proportioned than the long, slim fingers what worked so surely inside her now.

Her body seems to move almost of its own accord, rising and falling to generate the longed-for friction against Rose’s hand. She is slippery with desire, her body responding to Rose’s physical responses even as her conscious attention was focused on her partner’s pleasure (which in turn has rolled into, generated, her own).

The ache in her groin, which had dissipated as they lay together so quietly, has surged back like a physical pain. She bites back a gasp as Rose’s fingers find the nub-- “oh!”

“Shush, here,” Rose rolls away -- oh, her body trembles with the absence! -- and then returns moments later with the oil warmed against the palm of her hand. “There, let’s try again--”

And they do.

It had been impossible to let go of her consciousness earlier, when she was focused on working Rose open and pushing her up and up and up to the final crisis. She had been distantly aware of the gathering tension between her legs, the heavy, pooling need beating against the inside of her groin -- but it had been merely the backdrop to the pleasurable and all-absorbing task before her.

Now she had no reason to ignore it, _could no longer ignore it_ , as Rose pressed and pulled and twisted, working her fingers in and out and up and down, slick with oil and sweat and secretions of other kinds.

Maud flung an arm wide, gripping the blankets, pulling and straining to get both away and closer to the exquisite pressure of Rose’s hand.

She spread her legs, wanting, needing, knowing that finally she could have as much of Rose as she could ever want.

“You _left_ me.” Rose bends over to whisper in her ear, punctuating her words with the pressure of fingers working their way ever deeper inside. Two fingers, three. Pressing Maud open wider than she’s been opened since -- since the last time.

“You _left_ me. For _years_ I only had memories of this to return to.” In. Out. In. Out. Four fingers, now, Maud can feel. Carefully slicked with oil for ease of passage.

In, then out. In, then out.

She bears down on the hand, reaching down between her legs to grip the wrist and pull Rose deeper.

“More.” She grunts.

“Now we don’t have to live on memories any longer, do we.”

“No!” she gasps, “Please, Rose, please!”

“What is it you want, Maud?”

“You. Inside. _Please_.”

“Once you ask me in, I’m not leaving again. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes! I said yes, please, oh God, I’m sorry, so sorry.” Her hips rise off the bed, muscles bearing down, pulling Rose deeper.

Rose twists her hand, angling to stretch unaccustomed muscles. The sensation of being filled takes over Maud’s consciousness, the burning pleasure-pain of being forced open.

And then, so suddenly she half gasps, half moans with frustration, the pressure is gone and the space between her legs is empty.

She is bereft.

“Up.” Rose is saying, her slick fingers pulling at Maud’s hips, re-arranging her limbs with an intent that brooks no argument. “Up. On your knees. I want you from behind.”

Maud moans again, muscles shaking from need, but complies, rolling over onto her belly and burying her face in the pillows, bracing her elbows against the coverlet, as she feels Rose moving underneath and behind her, hears the dull _chink_ of the bottle carrying the almond oil as it is set back down on the bedside table … then the hand is back, newly-slick with oil, sliding down between her legs, pushing forward across swollen flesh until fingers part lips and find the angle to penetrate deeper.

She moans as Rose fills her, presses back against the hand. Her breasts, tender from Rose’s earlier attentions, brush against the bedclothes. She presses her chest down, her bottom back, rocking into the unyielding pressure of Rose’s hand.

“Yes, love, yes. Like that. Just like that,” Rose is crooning to her, almost as if she’s talking to herself, utterly absorbed in her task. The hand not inside Maud reaches up long the length of Maud’s spine, soft fingers up, then nails raking down.

Maud falls back against Rose’s thighs, waiting between her legs, unable to hold herself up any longer.

“Please.” She whispers. “Please.”

Rose reaches her free arm around and drags Maud into a sitting position, slipping out and around, then back down between Maud’s thighs from the front so that she can hold Maud’s limp frame securely in her lap, one hand between Maud’s legs and the other up under her arm and across her chest, hand cupping Maud’s aching breast.  
She tilts her head slightly and reaches around to take Maud’s ear lightly between warm lips, then teeth.

Her fingers begin to circle steadily against the heavy folds between Maud’s thighs while her tongue flickers in and out, in and out.

Their bodies are rocking together, thighs tensing and releasing, tensing and releasing.

They fit together perfectly, as they always have.

And thus it is in that moment, when she has quite forgotten where her own skin ends and Rose’s begins, when she has quite forgotten that this rising tide of pleasure, this movement of bodies, is ever meant to peak, when Maud is caught up in the seemingly eternal moment of two bodies, together, in motion, that the air around them seems to constrict, then expand, her body pulling in upon itself and flying to pieces all in a moment. She is arching up off Rose’s lap, her neck braced against the hallow of Rose’s shoulder, and then they are falling together, back against the rumbled coverlet, to lie breathless, in sudden stillness once more.

_Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock._

* * *

It is in this moment Maud realizes, to her own surprise, that she may indeed – after a lifetime of years – finally be returning home.

**Author's Note:**

> For notes on the series title, see [part two](http://archiveofourown.org/works/329629) (I didn't realize it was a series until then!)


End file.
